I'm planning a short trip to 新潟　with my wife. She wants to stay overnight at one of those ラジウム温泉 and I'm a bit worried*. I'd never heard that radiation could have a healing effect, so I googled a bit. After few hours I realized that most of the Japanese sources I've found, basically supported the theory "If ラジウム温泉 were bad, the government wouldn't let them do business (how naive ;D). In addition, those some of 温泉 are more than 800 years old. If they were so lethal we would have found it out long ago, don't you think?". Instead, most of the English sources supported the theory that "Radium is BAD". Radon is the number one cause of lung cancer among non-smokers, according to EPA estimates. Overall, radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer. (source EPA's site http://www.epa.gov/radon/healthrisks.html ). Moreover, National Research Council (U.S.) states that exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation (what happens in ラジウム温泉) is thought of being related to development to cancer in humans (source http://bit.ly/HFtfim).
I can't judge properly, as my googling skills suck (maybe I found only biased papers) and I'm not an expert. I found a lot of conflicting studies, so basically I'm going to go with the rule of thumb, "If you are not sure that is safe, don't do it".

Disclaimer: I'm sure that even if ラジウム温泉(Radium hot spring) are bad, 2 hours wont kill me but meh.... However I'd like to figure out if radiation hormesis is just a urban legend spread by ラジウム温泉 owners and by pronuclear scientists or what.

*Yeah, I'm living in Japan and eating Japanese food so I can't worry about ラジウム温泉 without being hypocrite but...One thing is living in a country with a slightly high level of radiation, another is being careless.

Radiation is not purely bad. Google around for the cancer causing effects of -insufficient- radiation. It's not particularly common, but there are regions that are far enough away from the poles and at a low enough elevation that they are well-insulated from the sun and also have a lack of radioactive minerals. A few studies have been done that found counter-intuitive results that suggest very low radiation exposure is also unhealthy.

I don't know if the correct 'ideal' amount of radiation has been identified yet, but I suspect the majority of people who live in first-world countries are above rather than below it - X-rays and airplane trips and whatever else provide radiation exposure. The type of radiation is probably a factor too.

While you're at it, google around for radioactive toothpaste... when the understanding of radioactivity was very new, and Madame Curie was still quite healthy... there was a widespread belief in the beneficial health effects of radiation. That didn't work out very well for a lot of people, of course.

I wouldn't worry about a radiation level that's less than say, 4-5 chest x-rays or a trans-atlantic flight. We accept those risks all the time unquestioningly. But I have no idea what the exposure level is of these ラジウム温泉... if it's significantly higher than that, I might worry. I'm fairly confident that there's no real health benefit, or if there is, it's from some other cause than Radium.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:A few studies have been done that found counter-intuitive results that suggest very low radiation exposure is also unhealthy.

You need to post these studies so we can critique the source.

I'm calling bullshit on these studies and this general idea of "not enough radiation is unhealthy" though until I see them, especially if they are suggesting you need exposure to high energy particles. That stuff WILL cause cancer and you are better off avoiding high energy radiation.

Japanese are overly superstitious, arguably more than what I'm use to back in the US. But this takes the cake.

OP, my suggestion is avoid these springs.

vix86 Wrote:You need to post these studies so we can critique the source.

Hnhhh, I read articles about these studies five years ago or more, but I do recall bumping into them repeatedly. Perhaps they have since been disproven (ie, alternate causes found for the affected communities). I'd have to search for them too, which I'm not doing tonight.

In any case, I'm definitely -not- suggesting extra radiation is healthy for the OP. Living anywhere in Japan would, I think, guarantee that he's -not- in the group of people that get almost no radiation. Being a foreigner living in Japan even more, as he presumably takes the occasional radiation bath in a high altitude flight anyway.

That is, even if the studies I'm thinking of haven't been disproven, and even if they are talking about the same kind of radiation - radiation being an annoyingly vague word that refers to several different phenomenon - even if those things are true, the OP still wouldn't be in that tiny category of underexposed people, he'd be with the 99+% of us that are overexposed and should generally avoid radiation.

Radium in particular already has a rich history of being added to products. The radioactive toothpaste I mentioned made people's teeth fall out (and surely drove their cancer risk wayyyy up.) I'm sure regularly bathing in radium-rich waters would be extremely foolish. On the other hand, I'd risk a small amount of radiation once just for seeing the place. Whether the level of radiation actually -is- small is the question that really needs answering first, though... it could be severe.

Hnhh, despite my best intentions to go straight to bed, I googled.

I don't care for the tone of this page (it seems to be trying to make some political points or other) but it has a lot of interesting links on the other side of the radiation question.

http://knowledgeofhealth.com/is-a-little...d-for-you/

Still doesn't answer the important question of just how radioactive the onsen is, of course. I also don't see anything quite exactly like the study/studies I was thinking of.

Interestingly, looking at Japanese wikipedia I found that the Arima Onsen near Kobe--the first onsen I ever went to--has a radiation level of about 13 microsieverts an hour. A high enough level that the Nuclear Safety Commission would recommending staying indoors if those were the radiation levels outside.

To compare, in May last year, two months after the earthquake disaster, the radiation levels in Fukushima city were 1.6 microsieverts per hour, considerably lower than the onsen.

But, actually, it's a low enough dose that a short exposure to it will not increase cancer risk in a meaningful way (it would increase your risk only theoretically if at all. The number is small enough that we can't measure it and therefore don't know if it's actually harmful). I mean, a mammogram is a single exposure of 2 millisieverts (note the different unit). An hour in the onsen is only .013 millisieverts.

Do you know the level of the onsen you want to visit? I doubt any of them are particularly high, but they won't have any health benefits either(even the people who support the idea of radiation hormesis aren't saying that it would work like this, haha).

I went to a martial arts gasshuku held at a (name withheld) temple in Japan. For many years, the water there was supposed to be wonderful for your health, etc. Apparently, at some point, someone had the water analyzed, and the well has been shut down, and there are signs at the temple about avoiding the water.

I'd stay away from the radium onsen, personally, and ignore any local lore. Despite alleged health benefits, I've never seen any indication that radiation was good for you, other than as a cancer treatment, where "better than the alternative" would be a better description.

bertoni Wrote:I went to a martial arts gasshuku held at a (name withheld) temple in Japan.

Why would you tell us this story but not tell us the name? Cause, gotta tell you, anything I hear on an internet forum that I can't confirm myself is immediately stored in the "things I heard but aren't true" part of my brain.

There is, apparently, a substantial amount of evidence that low levels of radiation are good for you.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18648595

Of course, political and financial interests are all mixed in, but I did find the above paper interesting if only for the wide number of other papers that it in turn cites to back its claims and give a wide overview of the theory.

I also found the notion that we have reverted to amputation for antibiotic-resistant gangrene rather than using the priorly successful x-ray therapy is kind of disturbing though I haven't yet gone into reading up on that particular topic.

However, since my rather offhand 'there was a study once that I recall' post I've been reading up on this radiation hormesis theory in my spare time for a couple of days. There's a -lot- of evidence for it.

I'm not at this point saying it's true, but I am saying that it's more than an urban legend and is in fact a theory with a fair amount of evidence behind it. (France is apparently saying the same thing, at least as I read quoted statements, though pro-hormesis writers claim a bit more than that. I don't know if they are exaggerating or if I just haven't read the right announcements from the French authorities.)

I had thought it was only a curious effect that only mattered to people who lived in areas with near-zero background radiation, but apparently it's a good bit more important than that.

My impression of the science on this issue is that we have no idea whether relatively low higher levels of radiation are good for you, bad for you, or neither. (One aspect of this is that there are so many factors affecting cancer rates that we can't tell how relatively low doses of radiation affect cancer rates. Radiation level is one of way too many factors. We can't isolate it.)

Whatever the case may be, it's certainly not dramatically good or bad for you. It's a bit like talking about the negative and positive aspects of drinking wine. Really, you can just not think about it and you'll be fine. Maybe your lifetime likelihood of cancer will change by a fraction of a percent... but who cares?

Well, fair enough, it was Kashima.

I followed some of the links in the "radiation hormesis" article. I found the part about atomic bomb survivors doing better was rather odd. Here's a quote from another study:

Quote:An excess of solid cancers became apparent approximately ten years after radiation exposure. With increasing follow-up, excess risks of most cancer types have been observed, the major exceptions being chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, and pancreatic, prostate and uterine cancer.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19454804

While it's possible that some radiation exposure is good for you, that's a very different statement that people will benefit from more radiation exposure. We all get radiation exposure already. And people seem to be able to interpret studies in different ways.

I think you mean the claim,

Quote:To their benefit, RERF authors did note that the cancer death rate of the control group (>3 km from the epicenter), which received low dose irradiation (0.2–0.6 cSv), was lower than that for persons not in the city at the time of the bombing (the original control group) who received less ionizing radiation (Shimizu et al., 1992).

I don't believe that the survey paper ('the good, the bad, and the ugly') is referring to the part of the abstract that you quoted, but since I can't see the full article (for effects in bomb survivors) at the moment I can't be exactly certain. (I am wondering what kind of access I can get for seeing full articles from nearby libraries now...)

In any case, the bit about solid cancers etc., refers to a 0-2 Sv range where the overview article refers to a 0.2-0.6 cSv range (which if that's standard metric naming, would mean .002-.006 Sv, I believe) ... in other words, people that were lucky enough to get what should probably be called something even less than 'low dose' (microdose? centidose? very tiny dose?) which I had understood (from good-bad-ugly) were mentioned (in bomb survivors) almost as an aside in the concluding remarks.

Not my field at all though so the thick jargon (especially in abstracts with their compact phrasing) makes it a little fuzzy at the moment.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Ia 0.2-0.6 cSv range (which if that's standard metric naming, would mean .002-.006 Sv, I believe) ... in other words, people that were lucky enough to get what should probably be called something even less than 'low dose' (microdose? centidose? very tiny dose?)

This actually isn't so low. 0.6 cSv is enough that the increase in cancer risk is measurable, though less than 0.5%. It's about the same as a chest CT scan.

(A mammogram is 0.2 cSv)

Well... in the context of exposure to an atomic bomb, getting a radiation dose on par with a clinical procedure is -extremely- low, but my real point was that the numbers of the one paragraph is talking about a 'low dose' that appears to be a factor of 1000 higher than another paragraph's 'low dose'. Hence my belief there was a misreading, and as an aside, that a different term is probably reasonable.

I do, however, appreciate the guidance... I have to admit these units are hard to grasp. The comparison to clinical procedures is very helpful.

At any rate, one cSv is 10,000 microsieverts (a sievert is 1,000,000 microsieverts), and I'm guessing onsen are in the 1-20 microsievert per hour range. And that's nothing to worry about. But it would be nice if we had the name of the actually onsen to know for sure.

(Sorry, I know I'm not really paying attention to the articles posted)

13 microsieverts is 0.0013 cSv, which is the amount at the onsen I went to. As I said, that's high enough that the Nuclear Safety Comission would recommend you stay indoors, and it's much more than Fukushima city, which is evacuated.
(The number in Fukushima city may seem low. That's because most of the radiation from the plant goes in a different direction. In the right spots, even at 30km away from the reactor the number was as high as 170 microsieverts per hour at its worst)

So when you compare it to a CT scan at .6 cSv, a CT scan is a damn lot (many people have to get multiple scans, so actually a lot of people increase their cancer risk by as much as 2 percent, which is ridiculously high). I pointed it out just because there were a lot of much smaller numbers in this thread.

Internal and external radiation are a little different, as far as i know. So, a lot of those numbers are for external radiation, which (depending on the type of radiation), as far as i know, has very little risk for such a short dose.

However, internal radiation is generally more risky, because there's a higher chance that it's going to damage your cells if it's internal. Don't put your head underwater, and don't swallow any, in other words.

Saying that, even bananas are slightly radioactive, and i have no idea how the doses would compare.

I'd also heavily doubt the health benefits of this onsen.

I've also heard a story about a spa that claimed health benefits and was later shut down for it's health risks, but i can't remember the name of the place, or what was wrong with it. <- kinda pointless, sorry...

If you fear radiation exposure at an osen, you might also want to inquire if there are any nearby radioactive waste sites from the Fukushima incident. Apparently the waste is being distributed nationwide so everyone can share the suffering, or future suffering of cancer. Sounds crazy, but here's a link to the government documents along with the translation:

http://www.debito.org/?p=9547

radioactive waste is generally encased in something to keep it safe and contained. It might not sound pleasant, but it's about a million times better than living next to a coal plant, for e.g.

EDIT: wait, that's not even about radioactive waste. It's about clearing the debris from the earthquake.

Norman Wrote:If you fear radiation exposure at an osen, you might also want to inquire if there are any nearby radioactive waste sites from the Fukushima incident. Apparently the waste is being distributed nationwide so everyone can share the suffering, or future suffering of cancer. Sounds crazy, but here's a link to the government documents along with the translation:

You should really research this more on your own, and you'll find that nothing dangerous is going on.

IceCream Wrote:radioactive waste is generally encased in something to keep it safe and contained. It might not sound pleasant, but it's about a million times better than living next to a coal plant, for e.g.

EDIT: wait, that's not even about radioactive waste. It's about clearing the debris from the earthquake.

Wait?

I don't think that you read the information in the link. The title itself even makes a reference to the radiation from the Fukushima diaster; see below:

"GOJ Ministry of Environment is dispersing Tohoku debris, including Fukushima nuclear debris, around Japan despite objections of prefectural govts"

i read the japanese part. (well, the 1st email, anyway)

They want to clear the debris from the earthquake. But people are worried about the debris from Fukushima, so they're gonna have to disperse it to stop there being an outcry.

It's nothing to do with "spreading the cancer", it's to do with appeasing the public.

Debris from certain parts of Fukushima, sure, it's likely going to come with some radioactive material on it. However, debris with bits of radioactive material on it is NOT the same as "radioactive waste". (EDIT: of course, technically, it is radioactive waste so you can call it that i guess, but the difference between that and the kind of radioactive waste that is a direct by-product of the nuclear process is huge, so it just seems like waaaay overstating it and fear-mongering to use that term to me.) It's not going in your food, it's going to a garbage dump, so unless you happen to work on a garbage dump, you probably don't have any good reason to worry. And if you do work on a garbage dump, i still imagine you have far, far, far less chance of getting cancer from it than you do from living next to a coal plant, or mining lead, or whatever.

Given that they're not going to be regenerating the exclusion zone for a good while, i don't even know if any of the waste will actually come from there. It's probably from areas of Fukushima that actually are safe to live in, they just need the debris cleared, but people are unwilling to accept it because of "nuclear fear syndrome". That's how i read it, anyway.

As a species (not as individuals) we benefit from mild background radiation because it encourages genetic mutation. Sometimes, very rarely, those mutations are beneficial.

Joking of course. But that's the only way I can think of radiation being beneficial. Admittedly I never got beyond a physics AP class.

IceCream Wrote:It's probably from areas of Fukushima that actually are safe to live in...

Do you actually believe there are areas in Fukushima that are safe to live in? You are aware that the levels of radiation exposure for nuclear plant workers and the public considered dangerous before the Fukushima diaster were "adjusted" following the meltdown, are you not? Well, I guess all of us are given the freedom to believe in whatever we want to. It is just unfortunate for the children in that area who will be attending public schools so close to ground zero because their parents have such an easy going opinion about these matters.

I suppose it depends what your definition of safe is.

I am somehow reminded of this comedy sketch:

tbh, i don't really know what to believe about that. There's so many conflicting writings about radioactive things.

However, there are many, many journalists who consistently overemphasise the risks and scare-monger as much as they can regarding nuclear stuff. When you actually look at the health reports on the effects of Chernobyl from the WHO, you see a completely different picture from the one that journalists paint. For instance, i'm sure you've seen pictures of hospitals with children with horrific genetic mutations from the Chernobyl disaster? Well, they could have gone to your local hospital and taken those same pictures, because the WHO report found no significant increase in genetic mutations after Chernobyl. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/rele...index.html . Neither did they find significant increases in cancer, apart from thyroid cancer in children, who should have been given iodine to prevent this, and were given it in Japan. In fact, the biggest rise was in mental problems and fatalism among the population, which is probably at least part due to the scare-mongering the media did.

Coal, and heavy metals remain a far bigger health risk to populations, imo. But how often do you see people get as worked up about the health risks of these things as they do about even a mention of radioactivity? Yes, there are health risks with that too, but the responses often seem to border on hysteria.

Also, the regulations for radiation exposure for nuclear workers were extremely tight before the disaster. They were far below what is considered to be the level where there would be an increased risk of cancer, and have remained below that even with the raise. So the raising of the "acceptable level" doesn't necessarily mean anything on it's own, really.